Walk Through the Valley of the Shadow of Smirk

A. J. Jacobs is an Esquire editor who specializes in dubious achievements, and not just the kind that make that magazine’s year-end list. In order to write “The Know-It-All” Mr. Jacobs performed the parlor trick of reading his way through the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. Eventually he is liable to sample every product at Wal-Mart or travel cross-country on a gas-station tour. But for now the Bible is his gimmicky plaything.

“The Year of Living Biblically” is Mr. Jacobs’s reality-show version of living by rules set forth in the Bible. “If I wanted to understand my forefathers, this year would let me live like they did, but with less leprosy,” he writes, sounding like Woody Allen on a bad day. So he made a list of scriptural strictures, the more peculiar the better, and set out to fulfill them as a 21st century New Yorker. This mission is exotic to him, he acknowledges, pointing out, “I’ve rarely said the word Lord, unless it’s followed by of the Rings.”

With that mea culpa for any seriously religious readers, Mr. Jacobs goes about creating a methodology. He acknowledges having obsessive-compulsive disorder and loves the idea of following rules. Seventy-two pages later he has typed out every instruction he can find in the Old and New Testaments and set up a month-by-month plan to try them out. In addition to this tidy setup the book has a Hollywood-friendly ending: If Mr. Jacobs could not ratchet his religious faith beyond the point of being “a reverent agnostic,” he can at least arrange with his wife, Julie, to have twins in Month 12 as this experiment ends.

“The Year of Living Biblically” looks deceptively approachable. It is divided into short sections, each revolving around a particular rule. The dictum is set forth and then Mr. Jacobs finds some convoluted, often cute way of following it in his urban universe. “I wouldn’t stone you with big stones,” he promises an adulterer, brandishing some pebbles. “Just these little guys.” He has to give up doodling when confronted with “You shall not make for yourself a graven image.”

But these anecdotal passages are separate from one another. And they don’t add up to much more than a checklist of tricks. Far from creating an overall sense of living by biblical law, this book moves skittishly from topic to topic and generally forgets an idea after Mr. Jacobs has briefly toyed with it. Although he’s a very facile writer and even a successfully glib one, he has managed to bring a kind of attention deficit disorder to the theological constructs that are trivialized here.

Photo

A. J. JacobsCredit
Michael Cogliantry

There’s a certain amount of suspense in wondering what, say, “the Lord is my shepherd” will turn into. It becomes part of a trip to Israel, where a tough working-over from El Al airline security is linked with “I will ask you a question; hide nothing from me,” from the Book of Jeremiah. In the Negev desert Mr. Jacobs tracks down a shepherd and asks if he can mind the sheep; that way he discovers that they make “baa” sounds and are actually sheepish. “A loud ‘Hey!’ or a tossed stone, and the sheep fall right into place,” he writes. “Everyone can be a Jack Welch in the pasture.”

Beneath the gamesmanship and the showing off (Mr. Jacobs sports a full beard and long white robe in the midst of Manhattan) there is some genuine curiosity at work here. But “The Year of Living Biblically” cannot reasonably be described as “intellectual adventure,” even if Mr. Jacobs uses that term. The only adventures on which he embarks are research trips, like the one to Amish country that yields a joke with the punch line “she drove him buggy.”

Other trips, notably to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., and to Jerry Falwell’s church in Lynchburg, Va., carry Mr. Jacobs beyond his own secular Jewish outlook and engage him in difficult theological questions, however briefly. “In fact, you have to be quite sharp to be a leading creationist,” he writes, after grilling one such scientist about Noah’s Ark.

Because Mr. Jacobs is a primarily a memoirist despite his penchant for categories, much of “The Year of Living Biblically” is actually about his family life. Although he renders his wife and young son entertainingly, they wind up sounding like sitcom characters, if only because this book is spun out of such a contrived situation.

He trawls for laughs as he puts tape over a Celestial Seasonings tea package so that he will not lust for the geisha pictured. He’s less funny when obscuring part of his own wedding photo so that he won’t be tempted by his wife’s hot-looking friend. And when he turns “Whoever strikes his father or his mother shall be put to death,” from Exodus into a story about being swatted by his son with a toy bowling pin, he reduces a high-minded premise to household schtick without skipping a beat.

“The Year of Living Biblically” is very much a product of its times. It could not have been written without the cute flourishes that are newly possible in the Age of Google. It’s a matter of minutes to search for sellers of harps (“Home is where your harp is!” is one slogan) or edible insects on the Internet. And it is simplicity itself to procure these things, use them to meet the Bible’s requirements and then move on to the next little hurdle. In Mr. Jacob’s germ-free, Purell-washed hands, efficiency’s gain is theology’s loss.

THE YEAR OF LIVING BIBLICALLY

One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

By A. J. Jacobs

388 pages. Simon & Schuster. $25. $29.95.

A version of this review appears in print on , on page E9 of the New York edition with the headline: Walk Through the Valley Of the Shadow of Smirk. Today's Paper|Subscribe